Title. Where to get it for a reasonable price?
Anyone know…?
Jewelry supply houses.
An arbitrary length of smooth surface wire in the asked gauge? I mean, really?
My friend Google:
What… price per 2cm length? Did I possibly misread?
That’s simply not possible for DIYing. Seriously it can’t be 20$ for 2cm can it? I misread?
Both silver and copper are better conductors and, in their pure form, can be had for much cheaper than 24K gold….
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No. Can’t say that. A conductor has much more than resistivity in terms of properties that affect the signal transmission.
For example, silver isn’t necessarily “better” than copper depending on application because as Galen stated, more power is actually transmitted through equal gauge copper. It depends even on things like diamagnetic properties, all that affects skin depth behaviour, etc. It’s VERY complex.
Gold has many times been revered as an interconnect material. I wonder why? Probably because it’s more pleasing to the ear as a conductor for voltage transmission. Current? Dunno.
Huh?
You can spec gold wire in any way you would like. You need only put a little effort into it.
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It’s popular for plating connectors because it does not corrode.
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Elk do you mean I can make gold wire behave like anything I want with geometry? Yes… I guess so?
But I want to get into the heart of it, the characteristic impact of gold’s lattice structure on signal transmission and how it translates into sound.
When I’m rich…
No, only that you can buy gold wire in any format you choose.
I doubt there is any benefit in pursuing gold over other better conductors other than, as speed pointed out, gold is stable.
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Please. Don’t be so adamant about less resistive conductors being “better”.
Have you heard of JPS Labs? Aluminium. And people like it.
In the end (if we knew how) we’d have to consider conductor properties at the quantum level to understand. It will take a while. Until then we have to LISTEN for the differences - use same geometry with different materials and listen. It will sound different. Silver might not be the best. Even copper might not be the best.
Also, this… There’s more to atomic stability than corrosion resistance!
An example: A.J. van den Hul devised an interconnect based on carbon nanotubes. He says copper is absolutely inadequate because when any oxygen is present, the interface will act as a copper oxide rectifier. This is NOT wanted in a cable - his nanotube design does not have this problem. (Dunno how good it is, but he is right about the copper part)
Yes, it can. Today 24k gold is $56.66/gram. While I don’t know how much a 2 cm piece would weigh gold is very dense, more so than copper or silver so the weight of a short piece may surprise you. Also, to make into wire requires work, i.e., money so don’t think you’re going to get a 1-gram piece of wire for $56.66. Might be 2-3 times that price in small lengths. There’s a reason you don’t see many audiophile things made of gold! Keep in mind gold plating of connectors can be done with a very thin layer, maybe only a few atoms thick, hence its popularity.
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For sure, it’s just that I’ve seen pure gold RCA and XLR interconnects for sale from 800$ to 3000£ for 1 meter. Surely they’ve gotten that gold for “cheap” then?
In this thread - forget about gold plating. This is about pure gold. I know how gold plating works and it’s irrelevant here.
Wow……
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Really I don’t see why the confusion about materials alone making a difference.
Galen’s ICONOCLAST cables are clear proof that yes, even slightly different materials (here, grades of copper) do sound remarkably different - in the same exact geometry! Galen doesn’t have a clue why this is.
So we can really throw away our preconceptions about better or worse conductors, they will always sound different and better is up to the listener.
If ya got some straw, I got a great spinning wheel, could turn it into gold no problem.
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Well I have some lead blocks, wondering if there’s any chance of orbitally rearranging their atoms using a meticulously designed harmonic resonance chamber that fluctuates the orbitals in a sort of triangular fashion, creating vanishing ground potentials that’d remove a few electrons such that a few protons would also displace due to a local “spike” in electropotential near each atom…
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Sure, go for it……
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